Social bookmarking websites adopted to spam by using the nofollow tags. The same things happened with other websites, like Yahoo Answers which was a great tool to get your website indexed fast.

There are still some social bookmarking websites that are good, but most of them are not.

You have to pick them one by one which can be time consuming. It also means it is wiser not to invest your money in software that auto submit to these sites, if you are looking to get backlinks.

It does not mean these sites are totally useless. You can get tons of traffic, but not a useful strategy to get backlinks. This does not mean you should completely ignore social bookmarking websites, but you need to be more careful how you spend you time and money.

There are services who still do social bookmarking. There are software which still submit to these sites. The salespages will not change to show the complete truth. The services want

to make money, they will not adopt to the change maybe because they do not want to loose clients or it can be any other reason.

Bottom line is, social bookmarking websites are no longer effective to get a ton of backlinks like they once was.

If you think about it, it is not their fault. It is an advantage for them to use the nofollow tag, so they get rid of spammers who constantly submit their website or useless doorway pages just to get backlinks. There was black hat software as well, to automatically create accounts in these websites and then get a ton of backlinks easily.

All these things effected the change.

Social bookmarking websites do not need this stuff. They are created to help visitors as a service to allow them to bookmark websites they like or frequently visit.

Spamming creates problems for them. It totally makes things ugly for them.

That is why black hat software do not have a long term value. Most of the tasks they automate are nasty in some way or another. Now why do you think these black hat software still get promoted, still get purchased and still new pieces of software get created?

The owner makes a ton of money selling these software, especially selling to the so called newbies. The salespage can be full of big promises but they do not mention the bottom line.

The bottom line is the black hat software they are selling will sooner or later be completely ineffective. This is really bad.

If you have a hundred, thousand or any number of backlinks created by these software like blog comments you just lost all those backlinks. When blogs adopted the nofollow tag all those links got useless. It means a sudden drop in the rankings.

Search engines just like the owners of the social bookmarking websites notice spam and adopt to it as well. They like the backlinks you get which remain there for a long period of time.

So be careful when using black hat software, and think twice if you are going to spend some time or money on social bookmarking websites.